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gaming: The art of play.

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, B, ARemember when cheating at video games was harmless fun? Meet the racketeers, rapists, and hustlers of today's online gaming.

By Luke O'Brien
Posted Friday, Aug. 10, 2007, at 7:28 AM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to expand.

For gamers weaned on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Contra occupied a special spot in the cartridge lineup. The impoliticly named shoot-'em-up of the late 1980s featured two Stallonenegger protagonists armed with "spread" guns and tasked with kicking tail in the Central American jungle. With hours of fast-paced action and cooperative play, Contra was an NES sensation. But there was a hitch: The game was so difficult to complete that most players had to cheat.

Punch a now-iconic series of commands into your controller (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A), and the Contra gods would boost your lives from three to 30, more than enough to blast a path to the final boss. Dubbed the Konami Code, after Contra's Japanese publisher, the secret sequence was one of gaming's first great "cheats" and helped inspire a tradition of semisanctioned cheating that is still flourishing today. In the new Transformers game, a similar sequence (up, down, left, right, up, up, down) gets you unlimited ammo. And the Konami Code itself still works in recent titles like Quake 4.

But as games have grown in complexity, so has cheating. Massive online games such as EverQuest and Final Fantasy involve thousands of strangers playing simultaneously, striving to obtain virtual assets that have real-world value (by some estimates several billion dollars' worth). Cheating in these games can be at once harder to identify and more troubling.

While the Konami Code had the whiff of the illicit about it, the code was programmed into the game cartridge. The only people you were cheating were the pixilated bad guys and, perhaps, yourself—out of the experience of beating the game without all those extra lives. Compare Contra with World of Warcraft, the 9-million member online game, where a hue and cry has ensued over the practice of gold farming, in which players, many of them Chinese, earn virtual gold through drudging labor (by killing the same monster over and over again, for example). The farmers then sell their gold to lazy players, many of them American, who use it to acquire coveted weapons and armor they don't have the time or dedication to earn the hard way.

Most gold farmers haven't hacked the game. They're only doing what any player could do, given the time and inclination. But their efforts foul up the game's economy, and Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, has banned tens of thousands of them.

So, where does gameplay end and cheating begin? Given that virtual property now has real-world value, it's no longer just an idle question for gaming geeks. These days, there's enough nerdy talk about social contracts, democracy, and deontology in games to wear out a Lyceum. Much of it centers on the ethos of the gamer, who by nature—and indeed by nurture—is a subversive creature. He hunts for shortcuts and trapdoors. He looks for ways to bend the rules. It has been this way for as long as mischievous designers have written software for rebellious kids. Which is to say: forever. Or nearly so.

In 1978, Warren Robinett, a recalcitrant Atari 2600 game designer, squirreled the first widely known "Easter egg" into the first action-adventure game (appropriately titled "Adventure"). Fed up with the lack of credit given to programmers, Robinett turned a single gray pixel in the middle of a gray wall into a portal to a secret room, where his name appeared in bright colors.

Robinett's naughty pixel started a trend. Other designers, toiling anonymously in the video game trenches, began seeding games with secrets, a way to put a personal touch on their work. Before long, Easter eggs had transformed into full-blown cheat codes that unlocked bonus characters, special levels, and superpowers. The first cheaters in games were the people who made them.

Naturally, players were soon demanding hidden content, and game companies obliged them. Insider magazines like Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly emerged, offering playing techniques and tips, but also cheats. They spawned their own booming satellite industry of cheat purveyors: strategy guides and Web sites that unearth and distribute new ways to game the games.

The cheating question got a bit knottier with the introduction of devices like the Game Genie, a piece of hardware that let players, say, make Mario immortal. Introduced by Galoob in 1991, the Game Genie allowed you to cook up your own cheats. Nintendo tried to keep the product off the market, arguing that altering the code of its games amounted to copyright violation. Most gamers, however, saw nothing wrong with the device, whose descendants are still popular. You were still only cheating a game. You weren't taking advantage of anyone else.

When gameplay becomes a social contract, however, everything changes. This, of course, happened long before the advent of today's online games. To be successful at NHL '93, the hockey game to beat all others, you had to learn "The Move," a deke that worked on the opposing goalie just about every time. The Move was essentially a glitch in the game's programming—you either banned it and played against your friends the way the designers intended, or you endorsed it and made the contests about seeing who could execute the move most effectively and most often. But only a hustler—or a real jerk—would use The Move on an unsuspecting noob.

The social contract gets a lot more complicated once your opponent is no longer the buddy sitting next to you but rather a few hundred thousand people around the globe—all of whom have invested time and money in the game. Cheaters who exploit glitches in online economies can affect the real-life bank accounts of other players. "When there's money to be made—and there's certainly money to be made playing online games—cheaters come out of the woodwork," write cyber-security experts Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw in their new book about cheating in online games. The result is a "virtual arms race" between the cheaters and the game companies that crack down on them.

The cheaters, for the moment, seem to have the upper hand. Scam artists now write their own code for online games, whether it's to gain an edge in a Counter-Strike gunfight (with an "aimbot" that makes targeting a cinch) or to bilk other players out of virtual goods. Although code manipulation hearkens back to the Game Genie (and many games owe some of their success to players introducing third-party tools and mods), malefactors in online worlds are no longer just goosing the longevity of Italian plumbers. They are victimizing other players. Recent reports have identified rapists in Second Life and racketeers in Eve Online. In Lineage, the wildly popular South Korean multiplayer, criminal gangs muscle protection money out of new players. The extortion is so widespread that the government's cybercrime division now monitors it.

We're a long way from Contra. But what to do about it? Mia Consalvo, a professor at Ohio University and the author of a recent book on cheating in video games, believes that gamers need to work it out for themselves, determining the boundaries of acceptable play and ways to punish transgressors. Players might shame cheaters, report them to administrators, or blacklist them from war parties. Or even resort to more drastic measures. Some gamers in World of Warcraft have turned vigilante, hunting down and slaughtering gold farmers.

In Consalvo's vision, the once impish, cheat-happy gamer must now play the role of hall monitor. But it may ultimately be up to the programmers—the ones who introduced cheating to gaming in the first place—to find ways to protect gamers from the thugs who have finally taken that tradition too far. Surely the guys who found a way to sneak the Konami code onto an NES cartridge can think of a way to keep bespectacled villains off the servers of World of Warcraft.

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Luke O'Brien is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Part of the blame (if we are into assigning such) must lie with the game designers. Many of these games rely on the players performing boring, repetetive tasks for some reward. Is there any question that players are going to attempt to find ways to circumvent these uninteresting elements of the game?

--Egaeus

(To reply, click here.)

It does not seem to be mentioned anywhere that cheat codes are necessary for game designers to test the games. The people who write these games are far from the greatest players, and it's helpful to have some extra protection to get through to all the parts of the game.

--rsswier

(To reply, click here.)

Obviously online communities like World of Warcraft, Ultima, etc. are technically games. They're fun, full of magical creatures, and largely involve going on adventures to kill hidious monsters and collect treasure. But, as the article states, when you attach real-world monetary value to that sweet new battleaxe, your pile of Gold, or your ability to summon ice storms, things get sticky.

Logically, when you are in a competetive situation in which the outcome will determine whether or not your wallet has the potential to grow fatter or not - you're gambling. Now I fully understand that many, if not most players of these games don't give a hoot about how much they could pawn their enchanted Orc helmets for, but then again, those folks probably wouldn't be as concerned about cheaters (it would amount to just another part of the game). But there are obviously plenty of folks out there who do make bank after selling leveled-up characters, or worse, stealing other people's loot.

If you are at all concerned about dollars, its technically gambling, not gaming. I have no problem with gambling. But usually, there are very strict rules in place and an army of security to keep people in line and the cheaters out. That isn't what happens in online gaming, primarily because the creators figured that most players would play for fun, and not mix the real and fake economies. Thus, my advice; play for fun, not for profit, and consider cheaters just another in-game enemy to tangle with.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here.)

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the design of games like Everquest and WoW is that you have to install the game on your computer, which is also responsible for keeping track of some of your stats, which get uploaded after every interval. This is understandable considering how much computing power is required to run these types of games so naturally you may want to spread out the cost more evenly to the players. Well, the downside of outsourcing your processing to the gamers-- who have a stake at the outcome, is pretty obvious.

If you make it my responsibility to keep track of my location, my hit points, my mana, along with several other nerdy stats and do that a million times over, eventually some of these gamers will be hackers who will find where these int values are located. That probably explains how one can leap all the way across the board in less than a second or never die.

To make a sports analogy, that's like hosting a golf tournament where everybody has to keep their own score with no or little double checking from other players or the officials. Gee, I wonder what could go wrong.

As for "gold mining", thats probably the game makers fault too for making the game so boring that you don't do anything productive. Shame on the makers for not putting some quota on how many exp you can derive from a single source or how long you can be logged on per day.

Comparing cheating in online games verses super contra in this article was also lame because in contra, those "cheat codes" were put in the game on PURPOSE by the makers. This article also fails to point out that PC games tend to be more cheatable than consoles, where you would have to physically break into hardware. At least outsourcing the processing to consoles isn't as risky as doing so with a PC.

--senbassador

(To reply, click here.)

The main reason the average WoW player hates gold farmers really has nothing to do with their presence. Most fellow players I've talked to are either pretty much apathetic about it, or feel sorry for them. What we DO hate is the fact that they constantly spam our chat interfaces with advertisements for their gold selling services... sometimes so badly that it becomes difficult to play. Blizzard has been taking steps to make it harder for them to advertise, though, and it's becoming less of an issue. Thanks to a patch a few months ago, in two button clicks the spammer is both reported for spamming, and ignored by my interface.

They don't seem to really do much to the economy, because the majority of high-end items can only be acquired by visiting high-end dungeons personally, or personally playing in the various PVP arenas and battlegrounds (they are "soulbound", which means your character can't trade them). If anything, the flooding of gold on the market which might cause inflation, tends to be balanced by the flooding of raw crafting materials on the market (a main source of gold farmer gold) which causes a drop in the value of goods anyway.

--fel

(To reply, click here.)

(8/16)

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